Melkire

I’ll come back to this in a bit when I get to my second example of MMOs. Not necessarily. To me, “trinity” basically means that you have people optimizing for highly specialized builds, resulting in A, someone to take the damage, B, someone to heal the damage, and C, someone to deal the damage. It’s an extreme case of optimization where someone went, “hey, instead of all 16 of us taking these hits while trying to keep ourselves alive and also kill the boss, why don’t we get Leroy over there to force this big guy to hit him and only him. We can, like, dedicate a bunch of us to healing him, and the rest of you can just focus on dealing damage.” This is a pervasive notion born of the majority of video game industry revolving around “kill or be killed”, but I’ll roll with it. That wasn’t my point. My point was that the trinity more often than not forces you to choose between roles, at which point you are forced into performing certain tasks based on the role you selected. There are rare exceptions (SMN tanking with Titan-egi, for instance) but for the most part once you’ve chosen a role, you’ve dedicated yourself to specializing in that role. This is less of an issue for XIV, where each toon gets access to every available class, but still an issue, as each class (again, save SMN) is irrefutably forced into a role that’s optimal for it. Yes, you can toggle off Defiance or toggle on Sword Oath and go DPS, but that doesn’t change the fact that you were taken as a tank; if they didn’t need you tanking, they would have brought you as a MNK, DRG, BRD, BLM, or SMN. The problem is that the trinity model isn’t fresh. It’s tried and true but tired, like a cliché. What if most movies coming out of Hollywood were very cliché films? …oh, wait, that’s already the case. I’ll give you two examples of MMOs which, if they don’t break from the trinity model completely, at least make an effort to move away from the standard born from Ultima, EQ, and WoW. The first has already been brought up anumber of times: E.V.E. E.V.E. breaks convention by saying, hey, this big ship here, it has a ton of health, and because it’s so big, it also carries a ton of firepower. It doesn’t matter that there’s no conventional means of forcing aggro, when something dozens of times your size jumps into the system, your fleet either deals with it, flees, or takes the blow. “Threat”, in this case, is actual threat. Smaller ships, on the other handed, are more utility-oriented. For instance, tackling is a unique concept in that the most fragile units in the area are given the task of being the CC machines. Since there are no guaranteed kills without a tackler, E.V.E. essentially has a fourth archetype. Now mind you, the above is PvP related, and PvE mostly comes down to “duke it out ‘til the mobs are dead or you have to jump.” So let me turn to the next example: Puzzle Pirates. "But Puzzle Pirates isn’t a real MMO,” people tell me. Bull. If your definition of a 'real' MMO is “you control a character in real time from the third-person perspective and you have your own health bar and you kill other things with health bars before they kill you”, then congratulations, you’ve fallen into the mindtrap that is the “MMOs are Ultima/EQ/WoW” mentality. Puzzle Pirates is a massively multiplayer online game. Mind you, it’s pretty terrible given that it’s pay-to-win, but put that aside. You don’t have a health bar in PP. You have a toon, and you have some minor customization options, but the real meat of the game comes down to signing up to work on some other Player Character’s ship (unless you make enough in-game money, or purchase via cash-shop, your own ship). So a team of players, ranging anywhere from three to more than a dozen players in size, share the same “health pool” (despite a complete lack of a conventional health bar), and they’re all playing different mini-games (I’d love to see anyone call gunnery a minigame, gunnery is HARD) to contribute to the crew’s success. Some dude is playing a variation of Panel de Pon to keep the ship from taking on water, some other dude is playing with pentominoes to patch up the wooden hull, some other guy is navigating, and one dude is taking on all the tactical decisions by playing a real nifty real-time turn-based sea battle. This is a MMO that, aside from a few similarities (bilge pumping is kinda like healing, gunnery is kiiiiinda like dps but not really, tactics is tanking by virtue of giving you control over the encounter) breaks the trinity model completely. Now, the really neat thing about this was that each role (barring navigation and the tactical sea battle) could have multiple people contributing at a time. Joe Schmoe and Mary Sue were both free to take on whichever role they wanted. And the best part? People could rotate roles mid-battle based on who was needed where (“Michael, go swap with John, we need him on gunnery and you’re a decent enough bilgerat”). And you'd want everyone to get experience on navigation and tactics anyway, as guilds were not limited to a single vessel, so you could build up a fleet and you'd need experienced sailors/officers for your newer boats. It would have beeen more successful were it not for two facts: 1, it’s marketed and geared almost completely towards little kids and consequently is as obscure as all get-out, and 2, pay-to-win (buy bigger ship with more firepower) has more or less ruined PP given how difficult it is (or was, I haven’t played in years) to earn your own ship with in-game grinding. These kinds of games don’t get made very often. Most groundbreakers tend to fail for a variety of reasons, many of which are often unrelated to the quality of the game itself, and most executives would rather churn out WoW clones rather than allow developers to break from the proven trinity model. Disclaimer: My experience with E.V.E. amounts to several weeks' worth of trials and watching friends play. I spent the better part of a year and a half on PP. P.S. I wrote this up in Word and formatting is killing me aaaaarghurghlafblegrgle. P.P.S. I apologize for dragging this thread further off-topic.

Most of the interesting mechanics I've come across over the years have little or nothing to do with the presence - or lack thereof - of the trinity model. Take XIV's recent instances for examples: neither Diabolos' doors nor Gobmachine's bombs require any of the three archetypal roles to deal with. When I think "trinity-based mechanics", I think of things like stacking debuffs that need to be cleansed (or not, hello Arioch), AoEs that need to be positioned clear of the party, DPS checks... you know, the mind-numbingly boring fare that has come to pass for MMO design. All the trinity system does is impose cooperation on players by pigeon-holing them into certain tasks based on the class they chose when they started. Lack of trinity doesn't mean lack of cooperation, it just means that instead of Joe Schmoe performing task X every time, maybe he swaps out with Mary Sue for a particular encounter because Mary Sue's player happens to excel at said task for that particular encounter. Unfortunately, that's not how and will likely never be how MMOs are designed due to developers being caught up in delivering the familiar to the consumer base for safe returns. EDIT: Mind you, 1. I've never played GW or GW2, and 2. By all accounts Arenanet failed miserably in doing away with the trinity system, and it sounds like a lack of innovative mechanics had a lot to do with that.

I keep coming back to the "Clingy Maiden" section and cracking up. My God, that'd be awful. That owes a lot to SWTOR's background as a spiritual successor to the KotOR RPGs, in which romance-on-the-side was more or less a standard feature.

This is like asking if it rains in Spain: the answer is always "yes", and asking the question will always get you looks.

I'd love to attend; would give me a chance to meet you all. Alas, lacking in formal wear and grew-up-in-the-gutter Osric would feel out of place attending in that capacity. I can show up as part of the security detail, right? Original post says "with support from the Immortal Flames". Probably won't be on 'til 7PM PDT when I get home from work.

I. Basic Info Characters: Osric Melkire, Haruko Kokojo, Rotunda Crow Primary character: Osric Melkire Linkshells: Tentative Allies, Immortal Flames Primary RP linkshell: Tentative Allies II. RP Style Amount of RP (light, medium, heavy): Medium, I'd say. I love RPing as much as I love tackling the PvE content, I just wish I could get at the former more often. Always open to walk-ups, provided I'm not spastically jumping around like a moron at the time. Would love to get into more linkshells and group activities, hence signing up here. Views on RP combat and injuries: Gonna preface this by saying that any dice-rolling for combat, outside of your standard tabletop players-and-dungeon-master setup, irks the hell out of me. If there's no DM involved to mediate, the participants better be in /tell agreeing on what should happen. Audience gets a show and all participants walk away satisfied, instead of someone possibly feeling cheated by blind luck. Exceptions go to certain events, I suppose, as certain formats demand dice rolls for a fair, if blind, outcome. Injuries are fair game, so long as they'll heal in a reasonable amount of time. In my opinion, anything that might debilitate or otherwise hamper someone's ability to RP should never happen to someone without their explicit consent. That's how I like to be treated and how I treat others. Views on IC romance: If it works, it works. Forcing it is bad, but imo being completely averse to it closes off so many avenues of storytelling. Keep it IC, of course. None of this ought to cross over into real life. Views on non-romantic RP (family ties, etc): Family ties? Anything that impacts someone else's character in a significant way? Get permission first, is the motto I live by. So don't walk on up pretending to be my lost-long uncle who just needs a quick loan of 100k gil. D:< Views on lore: Look up what you can, try and do your best to stick to what's established, etc. Try not to be a total dunce by claiming you saw an elephant (does FFXIV even have elephants? brb looking that up). Views on chat functions (/say, /linkshell, etc): /em, /say, and /linkshells are fair game for RP, imo. /shout ought to be reserved for OoC, considering we have /yell. Exceptions for events like chocobo races, of course. /party is game if everyone IN party is game. And for heaven's sake, let's keep any ERP to /tells, people. No one should have to walk by and see you feeling someone up in /say or /em. III. Other Info Country: USA Timezone: Pacific Time (UTC-8) Contact info: Send me a PM here or a /tell in-game. [align=center][glow=blue]~Special announcements can be found in the posts below~[/glow][/align]

Reading through this thread again, I get the feeling that some people are under the impression that the vanity system is geared towards roleplayers or that Square-Enix somehow has them in mind. It's not. They don't. This is blatantly obvious when you examine how they've set up glamours. If the system had been designed with roleplayers as the primary or even a secondary audience, we wouldn't be seeing any of these restrictions or limitations. We'd be able to capture a particular appearance and apply it to ourselves regardless of what we'd actually be wearing. No level requirements, no class requirements, no mandatory "prism" items, none of that. Instead, if we take a closer look, we find: 1. Glamours are top-down. To have the widest variety of appearances at your disposal, you have to be level 50. From this is inferred that the intent was to give those at end-game the most options. 2. The number one complaint you'll find re: aesthetics at iLvl 50+, right after "I can't dye this particular set of gear", is "I look like everyone else". This dude's in myth/Allagan, that dude's in myth/Allagan, this girl's in myth/Allagan, etc. Glamours are clearly intended to feed that "I'm a special snowflake and I should look unique" ego. See: Yoshi's demonstration of a Lala swapping out an Allagan Tunic for a Crimson Vest. 3. From that follows that, with glamours in place, end-game players will have more of a reason to DR / dive into lower level dungeons more frequently for a particular piece of gear they're after (e.g. aetherial pieces that differ slightly from base gear in appearance can't be bought or crafted). More players in more queues = more activity. 4. Breaking vanity down so that it's by-piece and by-level-range means more for crafters to do, which means more to gather/purchase, all of which means more activity. It's so DoH and DoL have something else to do. Why else (other than code-imposed limitations) would they not allow us to capture our appearance as sets rather than pieces? tl;dr: Roleplayers are a tertiary audience for this system. The goal seems to be to stir up player activity from end-game players who otherwise squat in Mor Dhona / Wineport and only log in once a week. That this vanity system benefits RP is only icing on the cake. To think otherwise is a delusion that we'd best be rid of ASAP. I don't expect enough of an outcry from the community for level restrictions to change; outside of roleplayers, for which alts are more common, few will care about being dressed in high-level gear from level 1 (yes, even when leveling their other classes). I do expect the community to get Square to eventually allow DoM the breadth of aesthetic options that plate-wearers will have, as that's a more universal cause that people can get behind.

This. The entire point of this implementation, as I understand it, is so that you don't suffer unfair hits to your stats by choosing to run content in suboptimal gear for the aesthetics. Case in point, I love the Pirate's Bandana. But I can't wear it in end-game content because A, as a DEX item it's not suited for my MNK, and B, it's a level 15 item with no aesthetic equivalent at iLVL 50+ (at least, not that I'm aware of). That you can't use higher level gear as vanity while leveling is a shortcoming, but it's a common shortcoming. I came over to FFXIV from SWTOR about two months ago, and they can't deck themselves out in end-game gear while leveling, either. Cross-class vanity is probably being held back for the F2P cash shop; it's what Bioware is doing in SWTOR, at least, and it's been proven that people will pay for it. As if Square-Enix does F2P. Pffft.

Like wise, I'll have to lug around my clawed darklight gauntlets instead of being able to stash them.. Wasn't it explicitly stated that you can stash gear? Maybe I'm misreading that, but I doubt it.